Four Ghosts
by Irene A
Summary: In Ivalice, death has become the fashion, and all Delita sees are ghosts.


He expects to find her asleep, most eves, though her corpse has been a-moldering since St. Ajora's massday one year ago. The ends of his fingers will draw back the threaded curtains and the weight of his lady wife will be pressing wrinkles in the sheets. Delita never dreams of the whites of her eyes rolled up into their holes, nor the splayed shape of her crumpled upon his dagger, running envious red streaks 'cross the ground. Yet when dawn breaks— yea, before dawn breaks— he sometimes thinks he feels her resting next to him.

Delita has ever slept alone.

* * *

The sting of the air turns caramel and worse, the day the Inquisition comes for Olan. There is a strong wind, and the smell of it carries far enough that the tavern-owners shall complain the next morn. Few can have an appetite whilst the rot of heretic stabs at their nostrils.

Delita is king and so sits up straight for the ceremony, scepter in left hand and sword at the right. No ashes rise high enough to greet him, but he knows the rhythm of the flames perhaps better than anyone. When the thing is done and the soot stamped back into the ground, he sleeps but does not rest. One night he walks over to the cupboard against his wall, his bare feet cold upon the tile-stones. From his things he draws a stack of pages, written in a hand not his own. Quickly, he takes a case of wrought iron and draws a cloak over his head. His servants have long learned not to recognize him past midnight.

The woods keep a silence of their own, and the trees have claws with which to scratch at heaven. 'Tis wintertime, and they are bare, immodest—Delita supposes this is fitting. He digs the hole by himself, with his peasant's hands, and the dirt finds a way into every line in his palms. The task being done, he buries the box and the parchment both, the one embracing the other, keeping out air and worms alike.

Delita considers that after all, this is not so much like a churchyard, and he is burying no dead. The frost comes at him with pointed tongue and begs him to pause a moment before returning inward. Those pages were enough to set a man a-flame. O, but deep in one of his caverns Delita hopes that past seasons and seasons of snow and rime, the dirt will wear away, and someone will come upon what it is he has buried. A monk will lock it in a library or a young girl will sell it to a scholar on the road. Perhaps, then, it shall be no heresy.

For days, the taste of ash has been catching at his throat. When he wakes, in the morrow, it is gone.

* * *

He passes by the graveyards at noontides, some days. People let the king alone when he goes to visit his lady-wife, passed from this world so young. The courtiers whisper of his devotion—"aye, not an heiress in the kingdom could hope to take him a-bed"—but it is not her bones he is faithful to. If he hath a church at all 'tis surely a church of corpses, yet no prayers rise like banners from his lips. He says naught, amongst the headstones. Here, it is gentle, and he can stand very still.

But one day something comes out of the corner of his eye. A rider, whose hair sings of gold, with a girl at her back, the sun writing patterns across the feathers of their mount. Delita thinks he could put a name to it, almost, a name he remembers whistling grass in the cowfields, a name that has been with him longer than his teeth. But he does not speak it, then, nor shall he ever.

The shade leaves behind it tracks in the mud, yet by the time dusk comes, Delita is convinced he has seen nothing at all. And perhaps he is right, perhaps there was nothing there for him to see.

* * *

All the pretty maids wear red around their neck, in honor of those lost at war. There are statues of skeletons merchants sell in cloth-covered stalls, meant to ward off the Plague, and doctors mask their faces with curved beaks, waxed gloves. In Ivalice, death has become the fashion.

Tonight there is a ball, and the castle windows are crowded thick with faces. Dark-colored skirts rise like those old monuments must from the western sands, like bridges one cannot go under, gates through which one must not pass. In the corner, minstrels are trying an estampie, but none have come to dance.

They are telling ghost stories, all of them, for they are the latest gossip. One girl, the daughter of an earl, is recounting her new favorite. Her fingers almost catch on her red coral necklace, almost send dozens of small circles falling like seeds to the ground. "For you see, 'twas the prince himself who had passed." She touches once more upon her necklace, and continues. "He was haunting his own wife and child, and not the other way 'round."

The music ends with the tale, and it is a solemn quiet. For a moment Delita imagines all the eyes in the room have found him, that they are seeing past his gloves to the dead skin underneath—the calluses that stitch him together, that keep his blood from falling out. At last, at last, they have all found him out.

But his mind is simply playing tricks. The courtiers are staring, true, but Delita is king, and they have been staring all night.


End file.
